The label “Newgate fiction” applied to novels mainly of the 1830s depicting low-life characters and settings distinguished by a focus on crime. The authors Edward Bulwer-Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth wrote the majority of Newgate fiction. The name for the subgenre grew from the fact that most of the crime stories found basis in real crimes, highlighted in the prison publication The Newgate Calendar.

Critics of Newgate fiction claimed the authors presented their protagonists in too positive a light, turning them into sympathetic figures. The title character in Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) is softened as a victim of society, while the title character of Eugene Aram (1832) has a fully developed conscience. Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1839) fashioned charismatic criminals.

In its September 1845 edition, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine declared that such novels “deviate . . . from the standard of real excellence” by showing “low and humble life” to be just as “sophisticated . . . as elevated and fashionable.” Newgate fiction receives credit for creating notable reactions from writers such as William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens.

Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton

In his 1841 introduction to Oliver Twist, Dickens emphasized his new form of novel by remarking he had read about many “seductive” thieves, “bold,” “fortunate,” and “fit companions for the bravest. But I had never met with the miserable reality,” which he then proceeds to depict in graphic, for his era, imagery. Thackeray, however, charged even Dickens with making his scoundrels too sentimental, accusing parts of Oliver Twist of “something a great deal worse than bad taste” in its making the public familiar with crime.

The passing of the Newgate novel ushered in a new type of low-level novel focused on introducing the reading public to social problems resulting from poverty. Dickens would participate, as would Charles Kingsley in Yeast: A Problem (1848) and Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845). All revealed the deplorable conditions in which large segments of society had to exist.

Bibliography
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.

Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature, Novel Analysis

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